Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Suppose somebody tells me of a highly surprising or improbable event, m. In fact, let m be an event about as improbable as you can imagine. So my evidence for m is that ‘this person is saying that m happened’. I now have a choice between two views of the matter: (a) This person is saying that m happened. But m did not. (b) This person is saying that m happened. And m did. Now each of (a) and (b) contains one surprising element. View (a) contains the surprise: this person spoke falsely. View (b) contains the surprise of m occurring. So I have to balance which is more surprising or improbable, and then reject ‘the greater miracle’.

The hypothesis is immensely improbable, and the evidence can easily arise for other reasons. So the Bayesian calculation always comes down against the truth of the testimony, and in favour of the uniformity of nature. This is not to say that reports of things hitherto quite outside our experience have to be false. Science proceeds by finding such things. But we reason rightly when we maintain a sceptical attitude, until such time as the new phenomena are repeated and established, becoming part of the uniformities of nature.

Pascal starts from a position of metaphysical ignorance. We just know nothing about the realm beyond experience. But the set-up of the wager presumes that we do know something. We are supposed to know the rewards and penalties attached to belief in a Christian God. This is a God who will be pleasured and reward us for our attendance at mass, and will either be indifferent or, in the minus-infiinity option, seriously discombobulated by our non-attendance. But this is a case of false options.

the famous essay On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1806–73) talks memorably of the atmosphere of ‘mental slavery’ that sets in with the absence of the questing critical intellect. Even the truth, Mill says, when held as a prejudice independent of and proof against argument, ‘is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth’.

Obviously the attitude one takes to the ‘fideism’ that simply lets particular religious beliefs walk free from reason may depend heavily on what has recently been happening when they do so. Hume was born less than twenty years after the last legal religious executions in Britain, and himself suffered from the enthusiastic hostility of believers. If in our time and place all we see are church picnics and charities, we will not be so worried. But enough people come down the mountain carrying their own practical certainties to suggest that we ought to be. Maybe some day something will be found that answers to the needs without pandering to the bad desires, but human history suggests that it would be unwise to bank on it.

Perhaps only the simpler information is strictly given, but it is given in a way that carries its own suggestions (which may, as in this example, be seriously unpleasant). So philosophers of language are led to distinguish what is strictly said or asserted—the information carried by the utterance, called its truth-condition—from what is suggested or implied, not as a strict logical consequence, but by the way things are put, called the implicature.

The way in which implicatures are generated is part of the study of language called pragmatics, whereas the structure of information is the business of semantics.

People sometimes think that logic is coercive (‘masculine’) or that it implies favouring some kind of ‘linear thinking’ as opposed to ‘lateral thinking’. Both these charges are totally mistaken. Formal logic is too modest to deserve them.

What of the charge that formal logic privileges ‘linear’ thinking? This too is nonsense. Formal logic does not direct the course of anyone’s thoughts, any more than mathematics tells you what to count or measure. It is gloriously indifferent between propositions that arrive through speculation, imagination, sheer fancy, sober science, or anything else. All it tells you is whether there is a way in which all the propositions in a set, however arrived at, can be true together. But that can be a pearl beyond price.

Experience stretches no further than limited portions of space and time. In particular, all our experience belongs to the past and present. If we make inferences to the future, then these are inferences, and Hume wants to know the ‘chain of reasoning’ that they employ. The inference from what is true of one limited region of space and time to a conclusion true of different parts of space and time is called inductive inference. What Hume is bothered about has become known as the problem of induction.

Intuitively it can be thought of like this. There are three factors. First, how likely is the hypothesis from the word go? Second, how well does the evidence accord with the hypothesis? Third, how likely is the evidence from the word go?

In short, it is not just the fact that a result is improbable that should prompt us to look for some special explanation. We need some additional reason to think that the improbable result is not just due to chance anyway. Chance is just as good at throwing up improbabilities as design.

The famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) argued that indeed they can. ‘Normal’ science proceeds in the light of a set of paradigms, or implied views about what kind of explanations we should hope for. Periods of revolutionary science occur when the paradigms are themselves challenged. Science is to be seen as ‘a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions’. After the revolutions, our sense of what makes for a comfortable explanation of why things hang together changes.

Thus, suppose it is true that we inevitably approach the world with a particular set of preferred categories, partly set by our culture and history. It still does not follow that all such sets are equally ‘good’. Some sets have been discarded for good and sufficient reason. A scientific environment is (ideally) an environment in which the constant process of experimenting, predicting, and testing, weeds out the bad ideas. Only the ones that survive go on into the next generation. This is not to say that actual scientific environments are as ideal as all that: at any time science can no doubt boast its fair share of blinkers, prejudices, and distortions. But the process contains within itself the mechanisms of correction.

We might notice that Descartes’s position here contains a denial of epiphenomenalism. It is because the mental events are one thing or another that we move our foot quickly. If the mental were inert, God could let it fall out however he wants without affecting our well-being.

When we do use our intellects, abstracting away from the data of the senses, what kind of world are we left with? Descartes, the mathematician, believed that the real property of ‘res extensa’ was, as the name suggests, spatial extension. Everything else was the possibly illusory, sensory ‘filling’ of spatial volume by things like colours and feels—things that, like Galileo, he believed to have their real residence only in the mind. So as well as opening up dualism of mind and body Descartes and his contemporaries open up a dualism between the world as it is for us (sometimes called the ‘manifest image’)—the coloured, warm, smelly, noisy, comfortable, familiar world—and the world as it is objectively or absolutely (the ‘scientific image’)—the world that contains nothing but physical particles and forces spread out across the boundless spaces of the cosmos.

In this picture there is the scientific world, of objects as they really are in Locke’s time, a world of little particles clinging together to form bigger bodies, each having the primary, scientific, properties. This is the scientific picture. There is also the manifest image: the coloured, smelly, tasty, noisy, warm, or cold world we think of ourselves as inhabiting. But the manifest image is either in or at least largely due to the mind. The scientific world is not.

How can you get from the sensations of solidity in the mind, to any resembling property in the world? Whatever solidity is ‘in the mind’ it is not the same as solidity in the world. Our ideas are not solid, so what is the sense in saying that they ‘resemble’ solid things? And if solidity disappears from the real world, what is left? Berkeley’s own answer to this is notorious: nothing. His world retreats entirely into the mind—the doctrine known as subjective idealism.

Or in other words:’ [A]fter the exclusion of colour, sounds, heat, and cold, from the rank of external existences, there remains nothing which can afford us a just and consistent idea of body.’ Berkeley and Hume deny that we can really understand the alleged properties of the alleged independent world, except in terms drawn from our own experience—our own minds. The ‘modern philosophy’ or scientific world view requires us to make sense of a ‘scientific’ or ‘absolute’ conception of reality, thought of in terms of space-occupying things, independent of us, whose arrangements explain all that can be explained about the entire universe, including us and our experiences. But if this conception is flawed at its heart, we have to look elsewhere.

We can put the problem in the terms of Chapter 2. If God creates the physical universe, how much does he have to do? Can he get by creating only forces? In that case the universe seems to resolve itself into a giant set of ifs. Or does he also have to create objects, both for the forces to act upon, and perhaps to explain how the forces arise? If we plump for the latter, then what conception of those objects can we have? The first conception seems to leave the universe as some kind of huge potential, like a gigantic shimmer. Perhaps Descartes, the mathematician, was happy with this (it is a fascinating question whether he anticipated Faraday’s kind of vision). But common-sense thinking seems to demand something (something solid) to fill the bits of space that have matter in them.

In other words, if a Straightjacket is the kind of thing that comes and goes, we will be left with no reason for expecting its continuation. But have we any conception of something whose existence is not subject to time and change? Can we even touch it, let alone embrace it, with our understandings? Aren’t we once more left with Wittgenstein’s dire saying,’ [A] nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said’? Or in Hume’s words,

For Kant the priority is to get away from this ‘inner theatre’ model. We already met some of his approach in Chapter 4, on the self. There, we saw that various quite complex feats of organization are needed for self-consciousness. We have to organize our experience not as what Kant calls a mere ‘rhapsody’ or kaleidoscope of perceptions, but in terms of a temporal and spatial order. Only so can we get a concept of ourselves as moving amongst an independent world of objects situated in a space.

Kant sees that when it comes to space and time, size, shape, and the objective order, to have a concept is not to have a mental picture. It is to have an organizing principle or rule; a way of handling the flux of data. Having the same organizing principles or rules could give us the same understanding of the world in spite of differences of subjective experience.

The idea here is very similar to the ideas about the ‘self’ that we took from Kant, and indeed form the other side of the same coin. If we try to understand the self in sensory terms, as an object of experience, we meet Hume’s problem, that it is no such object. But if instead we think of the way a personal or egocentric standpoint organizes experience, the role of the self as an element in our thinking becomes clearer—and so do illusions engendered by that role.

What he wants is an understanding of the way in which concepts like those of things, forces, space, time, causation determine the way we think (and have to think) about the world. The intention is not to deny some element of scientific understanding, or indeed common sense, but to explain how those elements hang together in our thought. It is those thoughts that structure what he calls the ‘phenomenal world’: the world that is both described by science, and is manifested to us in sense experience.

What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth. ‘Analytical’ philosophy plays Plato to its sophistry, trying to silence its siren appeals.

Evolution and success shape us to be responsive to the real causal kinds that things fall into. While conceptualists are right to stress the contingent shape of our minds, they are wrong to forget that those minds do not exist in a vacuum. Our minds are naturally shaped by the causal structures of the world we inhabit. In favourable circumstances, we all ‘go on in the same way’ because, in the context of the world, that is the right way to go on.

This shows that the difference between concerns with which we identify, and concerns that we can objectify, is not always evident. We may not know until we try whether it is possible (or appropriate) to shake ourselves out of some concern, or whether it is only possible, or appropriate, to go ahead and to try to meet it.

When we talk of the reasons that move other people, there is an important distinction to notice. We can speak descriptively, or nor-matively. That is, we can describe what it is about a situation that is moving them. Or we can say that what concerns them is or is not really a reason, expressing our own endorsement or rejection of the concern.

To show how easily and naturally we incorporate the views of others into our concerns, Hume gives the splendid example: ‘A man will be mortified if you tell him he has a stinking breath; though it is evidently no annoyance to himself.’ We see ourselves from the point of view of others, and may be comfortable or uncomfortable as a result.

The difference is sometimes called that between ‘non-cognitivism’ and ‘cognitivisim’ in the theory of ethics. The idea is that if the equation is read left to right, then talk of something being good, or something being a reason for action, is a kind of reflection of a motivational state of mind: the fact of something weighing with you. This motivational state of mind is not a simple belief. It is not a representation of some aspect of the world. It is a reaction to representations of the facts of the matter. It does not itself pick out some fact of the matter. Hence it is not strictly speaking a state of mind that is either true or false, any more than a desire for coffee is either true or false.

If the equation is read the other way, from right to left, then there is at the foundation a belief: the belief that ϕ is a reason for action. It is a special kind of belief, because it picks out or represents reasons. But it is a belief that carries concern with it. It is often said that Aristotle believed in this direction of explanation: its slogan is that to desire something is to see it as good. It is as if desire answers to a perceived truth.

My own view is that all these problems disappear if we read the equation the other way. When people have concerns, they express themselves by talking of reasons, and seeing the features that weigh with them as desirable or good. They do this in the ‘pull of the will and of love’. I believe we invent the normative propositions (‘This is good’; ‘That is a reason for action’; ‘You ought to do this’) in order to think about the concerns to demand of ourselves and others. We talk in these terms in order to clarify our motivational states, to lay them out for admiration or criticism and improvement. There is no mysterious normative order into which we are plugged.

Our concerns weigh with us (that is a tautology; that is what makes them concerns). But their weights are susceptible to change, and one of the things that can sometimes change them are discussions, arguments, and an awareness of the direction of pull of other concerns. Hence we have practical argument, taking the form of wondering what is to be done, or what principles to endorse, or what features of character to admire or reject.

In cooperative moral discussion, it is intended that we come to common ground, where that includes common approval and disapproval. My disapproval is put on the table as something for you to share or undermine, but in either event as something that you are to engage on its own terms.

But practical reasoning is not in general like that. This is because we need to know where we stand. The constraint is here the same as with a system of law. It would be no good having a system of law that refused to articulate general principles and rules, but insisted on ‘treating each case on its merits’. If it were not predictable in advance what would actually count as the merits then we could not regulate our lives by such a ‘system’. It would be no law at all. Similarly in ethics.

Our ethical concerns are well seen on the model of Neurath’s boat (Chapter 1). We must inspect each part, and we have to do so while relying on other parts. But the result of that inspection may, if we are coherent and imaginative, be perfectly seaworthy. And if, relying upon it, we find ourselves in conflict with other boats sailing in different directions, there is no reason to lament that we are not seated in some kind of dry dock, certified by Reason or God. They are not in any such place, either.

I believe the process of understanding the problems is itself a good. If the upshot is what Hume called a ‘mitigated scepticism’ or sense of how much a decent modesty becomes us in our intellectual speculations, that is surely no bad thing. The world is full of ideas, and a becoming sense of their power, their difficulty, their frailties, and their fallibility cannot be the least of the things it needs.